Badu disbanded Erykah Free when Massenburg offered her a contract; she thought that she would receive more individual attention as a solo artist at a smaller label.
Eventually, with Cocker's backing band and her fellow vocalists, Wills did get to make the album Soft Centres, but it was as released on a small label, Goodear, in 1974 and quickly disappeared.
Mr. Baker, who has been signed as a producer to a small label, Pyramid Records, dug through a cardboard box of old records.
BTS's sonic narrative, much of which focuses on economic inequality, relies heavily on the boy band's underdog roots as a K-pop group from a small label.
Instead, he said, they're looking toward "integrated contextually relevant positions" -- for example, pages that let consumers browse for sedans will have three vehicles "spotlighted," with a small label defining them as "sponsored content". Edmunds Inc. is vulnerable to an online ad slowdown because car companies have been hard hit in this economy.
That is a long way from where it started in 1972 as a small jazz label based in Concord, Calif., about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco.
Mr. Field, an heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune, co-founded Interscope in 1989 as a small, alternative label and helped transform it into a powerful international music company.
Dao-Yi Chow (40) and Maxwell Osborne (31), the duo who started Public School as a small menswear label in 2008, have won high praise and popular support for their expert tailoring and the unique way they combine European minimal sensibilities with a cool native New York style.
As a small, new label, I can tell you it's hard.
"As a small independent label I feel it is our primary duty to expose our artists to a larger audience and the best way to do that is to get their music in front of active consumers," he explained in an email.
